Slide Show - Images (mostly) from The Illustrated History of Painting

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Everything Disappears

In the mid 1980s I executed two monumental commissions in California. One in San Francisco's Mission District and one at the well-known and highly visible corner of Hollywood and Vine, in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles work has recently vanished. And neither the art consultant who originally orchestarted the commission nor her art-lawyer can discover its whereabouts. Or why it diappeared. New(ish) state laws which protect the integrity of public works or ensure an artist's rights are not applicable to the work in question, due, paradoxically, to its vintage status.

I'm consoled in my loss by thoughts of all the many children who, over three decades, may have seen the work (out of car-passenger windows) from the adjacent freeway and surface roads.

Everything disappears. As, eventually, does every consequence of its going.

Lately

Expat American living and working in New Zealand.
I have a long-established painting practice and
occasionally write criticism for Art in America, Sculpture, Art New Zealand and ARTNET - among others.
Where I come from the only people who read visual art criticism and review are the artist ,his dealer and the artist's mother.